Books

Living, breathing, loving bodies: a new wave of Northern Irish writing

Writers more than ever use intimacy to subvert expectations of conflict and violence

A painted sign on a wall in Belfast in 1954 reading ‘Joy, Love, Peace’ in the shape of a shamrock. Photograph: John Chillingworth/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Caroline Magennis
Thu Aug 19 2021 - 06:39

My new book, Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures, is preoccupied with a central question – what does it mean to pay attention to the representation of the body, intimacy and pleasure in Northern Irish writing?

It is a question that I have been interested in for many years, for intertwining personal and political reasons – I left the North nearly 10 years ago after spending the first 30 years of my life living, studying and working there. From Manchester and returning to home in this writing, I began to notice a change in the theme and substance in fiction – a renewed interest in the body, sexuality and intimate relationships

There has been a remarkable flourishing of Northern Irish prose writing in the 21st century, particularly those works of fiction which deal with themes of intimacy, bodies and pleasure. The texts in this study engage with what it means to have a Northern Irish body, how that body is depicted in relation to others and how we might reconsider pleasure in a society with a history of violent conflict.

Recent years have seen an unprecedented volume of Northern Irish novels and short stories. This has featured outputs from some of the largest publishing houses (Faber, Bloomsbury, Penguin) as well as innovative work published by smaller independent presses, such as No Alibis Press, Doire Press and Stinging Fly. To engage with fiction at such a time is exciting and a formidable challenge – the critic of contemporary fiction is regularly left feeling overwhelmed by the variety and quality of new fiction coming out of the North.

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Several of these texts are set in and around contemporary Belfast (Wendy Erskine, Lucy Caldwell, Jan Carson, David Park, Glenn Patterson, Rosemary Jenkinson, Billy Cowan, Shannon Yee) and some delve backwards into the recent history of the Troubles for their setting (Anna Burns, Michael Hughes). Many of them, particularly in the short fiction, place Northern Irish characters in unfamiliar settings.

This book does not seek to be a complete account of Northern Irish writing but rather prioritise specifically those texts which, to me, most closely engage with the language of intimacy, pleasure and the body and offer new ways of relating to private life.

Northern Irish fiction is moving at such an unprecedented pace as we enter the 2020s that one hopes in the coming years academics will move towards more stratified appreciation of its diversity in form and genre and attend to crime writing, speculative fiction, romance, historical fiction and writing for young people.

It is not my intention to claim that a new relationship to intimacy was invented in the 2010s: each generation wishes to believe they have created the world anew. For decades, Northern Irish fiction has been invested in depicting relationships and domestic configurations, most prominently in the fiction of Mary Beckett, Maurice Leitch, Deirdre Madden, Brian Moore and Janet McNeill. But in the writing in this study there is a change in emphasis: there is a greater variety of intimate relationships, bodies and pleasures shown in texts. The intimacy that formed the backbone of social life in Northern Ireland is now foregrounded.

I wanted a criticism that would be as attentive to the experiences of my late grandmother, who raised six girls and a boy in Portadown during the Troubles, as it would be to the experiences of a combatant.

To be frank, I wanted a criticism that would be as attentive to the experiences of my late grandmother, who raised six girls and a boy in Portadown during the Troubles, as it would be to the experiences of a combatant. That would consider teenage girls deciding the risk was worth it to go to a nightclub in Mid-Ulster in the 1990s a kind of political act, as I dust off my memories of sneaking into Clubland and the Arena.

I thought about the Northern Ireland I knew, that my friends knew, and started to see this variety of experiences represented in texts but not academic criticism. I feared that the smallness of these precious moments would be elided by critics hungry for what a novel might say about the politics of the Troubles. I wanted to refuse, for myself and the authors in this book, the status of fetish.

I have heard innovative, thoughtful, rigorous engagements with Northern Irish literature, culture and society, but sometimes I listen to academic papers that are delivered as if the people I knew and loved were fodder for a case study and felt profoundly alienated.

But, these overdeterministic readings by some scholars, which prize the overarching political context above all else, are not exclusive to academics from outside Northern Ireland. Indeed, I have actively participated in events and publications where the prioritisation of violent acts and actors was the focus. I performed the version of Northern Ireland that audiences seemed to want to hear. But, slowly, I began to pay attention to when what I was hearing and saying felt wrong and feeling relieved when this new writing spoke to my own experiences.

I started to consider the complex idea of the afterlife of the conflict in the body when I spoke to friends and family – when you hear of an attack in Derry and your stomach falls through the floor or read about a bomb scare near your family home and your body becomes rigid. At the same time, I feel more at ease in Belfast than anywhere else, galvanised by the potential of a wild night out in the city. Belfast feels different and it could be both of these things at once.

These feelings did not square with being regularly depicted as being part of a haunted, traumatised population. Similarly, writers from the North are expected to speak profoundly of their relationship to nation states at festivals instead of their literary influences. As I read more and more of this “post”-conflict writing, I started to see the complicated world I knew emerge. There was laughter, wild imagination and the tenderest moments mixed in with a consideration of history and memory. The books I read became sites to think about not only history and memory but also sensuality and the physical body, but also to rethink our roles as critics of writing from the North.

For decades, writers have used intimacy as a way to subvert expectations of Northern Irish fiction. However, the fiction that was presented in this study feels different to earlier writing. These writers privilege the body as a place to unmake and remake the world. They dwell on small, tender moments of intimate connection. They allow women to be unashamedly sexual. The self can be lost in sensation or found in the surface of the skin. Things are not fixed. Pleasure and generosity are valuable. The body yearns to be touched. But most of all, they share an interest in intimacy – both the desire to be close and the pressures of that closeness.

These novels and short stories are complex meditations on what it means to be with and for each other, both in a universal sense but they also consider the complex social and personal histories of their Northern Irish protagonists. The “moments” featured in this study, when taken together, are not blithely optimistic but offer kernels of hope alongside a recognition of the forces that shape lives in a society with a history of violent conflict. At a time when we are reconsidering what it means to be together and apart, they are a vital reminder of what is important.

Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures is published by Bloomsbury Academic. Caroline Magennis is Reader in 20th and 21st Century Literature at the University of Salford, UK. She is also the author of Sons of Ulster: Masculinities in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel (2010).